Starmer faces Badenoch at PMQs
The BMA strike decision must be a tempting topic for Kemi Badenoch at PMQs, which is starting very soon. The Conservatives have repeatedly criticised the government for the way they swiftly settled public sector pay disputes when they took office; they argue that Labour was too generous to the unions, thereby encouraging them to threaten further strikes.
Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.
Key events
Darren Paffey (Lab) praises the government’s 10-year health plan, and asks for a neighbourhood health centre in constituency.
Starmer says these health centres will make a big difference. And he says the government has delivered 4m more health appointments.
Keir Starmer starts by saying Monday was the 20th anniversary of the “despicable” 7/7 terrorist attacks. He thanks the emergency services, and sends condolences to the victims, survivors and bereaved.
And he sends his condolences to the family and friends of Lord Tebbit. He praises is bravery in response to terrorism, and his devotion to his wife (whom he carried for for the rest of her life after she was badly handicapped by the Brighton bomb attack).
After PMQs there will be an urgent question about the Leveson recommendations about jury trials. Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, has tabled it, and a justice minister will reply.
Starmer faces Badenoch at PMQs
The BMA strike decision must be a tempting topic for Kemi Badenoch at PMQs, which is starting very soon. The Conservatives have repeatedly criticised the government for the way they swiftly settled public sector pay disputes when they took office; they argue that Labour was too generous to the unions, thereby encouraging them to threaten further strikes.
Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.
Streeting offers to hold talks with BMA to avert resident doctors’ strike, saying walk-out would put NHS recovery at risk
The Department of Health and Social Care has released the text of a letter sent by Wes Streeting, the health secretary, to the BMA resident doctors committee about its proposed strike action. In it, Streeting is marginally more conciliatory than we was when he was talking to the Times (see 11.27am) – he offers to meet them for talks to avert the strike, he does not use the “will not forgive” line – but not by much.
Here are the key points.
I remain disappointed that despite all that we have been able to achieve in this last year, and that the majority of resident doctors in the BMA did not vote to strike, the BMA is continuing to threaten strike action.
I accepted the DDRB’s recommendation for resident doctors, awarding an average pay rise of 5.4%, the highest across the public sector. Accepting this above inflation recommendation, which was significantly higher than affordability, required reprioritisation of NHS budgets. Because of this government’s commitment to recognising the value of the medical workforce, we made back-office efficiency savings to invest in the frontline. That was not inevitable, it was an active political choice this government made. Taken with the previous deal I made with the BMA last year, this means resident doctors will receive an average pay rise of 28.9% over the last 3 years.
I stand ready to meet with you again at your earliest convenience to resolve this dispute without the need for strike action. I would like to once again extend my offer to meet with your entire committee to discuss this.
As I have stated many times, in private and in public, with you and your predecessors, you will not find another health and social care secretary as sympathetic to resident doctors as me. By choosing to strike instead of working in partnership to improve conditions for your members and the NHS, you are squandering an opportunity.
Ultimately, we are all public servants. The public won’t see why, after a 28.9% pay rise, you would still walk out on strike, and neither do I.
Streeting says public ‘will not forgive’ strike action by resident doctors
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has said that the government will not give resident doctors more than the 5.4% pay rise they have been offered this year and that he will not forgive them if they go on strike.
In an interview with the Times, which has provided the paper with its splash this morning, he said a strike would be “a disaster for [BMA] members and a disaster for patients, just as we are finally moving the NHS in the right direction”.
He went on:
The public will not forgive strike action in these circumstances and nor will I.
He also said:
Patients do not support the proposed strike action and it doesn’t even command majority support among BMA resident doctors, less than half of whom actually voted for industrial action. There are no grounds for strike action now. Resident doctors have just received the highest pay award across the entire public sector. The government can’t afford to offer more and it wouldn’t be fair to other NHS workers either, many of whom are paid less.
Some 90% of resident doctors voted for strike action in the recent ballot, but the turnout was only 55%.
Resident doctors announce five-day strike in England from 25 July
Resident doctors in England – hospital medics below consultant grade who used to be called junior doctors – will go on strike from 7am on July 25 to 7am on July 30, the BMA has announced.
In a statement, BMA resident doctors committee co-chairs Dr Melissa Ryan and Dr Ross Nieuwoudt said:
We met Wes Streeting yesterday and made every attempt to avoid strike action by opening negotiations for pay restoration. Unfortunately, the government has stated that it will not negotiate on pay, wanting to focus on non-pay elements without suggesting what these might be. Without a credible offer to keep us on the path to restore our pay, we have no choice but to call strikes.
No doctor wants to strike, and these strikes don’t have to go ahead. If Mr Streeting can seriously come to the table in the next two weeks we can ensure that no disruption is caused. The government knows what is needed to avert strikes. The choice is theirs.
Ministers should think ‘very carefully’ before altering jury system, says Labour chair of Commons justice committee
As Haroon Siddique reports in his story on the Leveson recommendations, the Bar Council and the Law Society are both opposed to restricting access to jury trials. But the Magistrates Association is in favour.
Here is some more reaction to the plans.
Andy Slaughter, the Labour MP who chairs the Commons justice committee, said the government should think “very carefully” before changing the jury system. He said:
Juries are central to our constitutional right to a fair trial. We should think very carefully before altering a system that has served us well for centuries.
But that does not mean the ambit of the jury system can never change. Sir Brian makes a compelling case for radical change and the need for more than extra resources to restore the reputation of the criminal courts.
The justice committee will consider the recommendations on jury trial in the independent review with an open mind, alongside the series of further changes to the operation of the crown courts which the review recommends.
But Katie Kempen, chief executive at Victim Support, was more supportive. She said:
This review puts a much needed spotlight on the crisis in our courts. Sir Brian Leveson is right to call it unacceptable. The reality is the justice system is at crisis point with many victims waiting years for their case to come to trial. This causes immense suffering – victims’ lives are on hold whilst they are denied access to justice.
We are glad to hear that the government will carefully consider this review and recognise that some recommendations will make uncomfortable reading for victims. Whilst it’s essential that we see an end to long and painful delays this cannot come at any cost. Victims’ views need to be at the centre of all future changes.
Preventing some offenders opting for jury trials would be ‘big, backward step’, say Tories
The Conservatives have said that preventing access to jury trials for offenders charged with certain offences would be “a big, backward step”.
Responding to the Leveson report (see 10.35am), Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, told Times Radio:
[Leveson] can see no limit to the type of case that can be taken out of jury trials. So this is a slippery slope. If you begin to take away jury trials for these cases, the relatively limited number of cases that he’s proposing, where will it end? It could just keep rising and rising and rising. And you see a serious diminution over the years in jury trials. And I think that’s a big, backward step because we should trust the public. We should trust our system that has served us well for generations.
However, Jenrick did say that he agreed with Leveson’s call for the number of court sitting days to increase.
Jury-free trials proposed to save criminal justice system from collapse
Thousands of defendants in England and Wales could lose the right to a jury trial under plans designed to save the criminal justice system from collapse, Haroon Siddique reports. Here is his story about the proposals, which are set out in a report by Sir Brian Leveson, a retired senior judge. It was commissioned by Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, and she is expected to accept most or all of the recommendations, which are seen as necessary to deal with the very lengthy delays clogging up the courts system.
The 388-page report has been published here. The front page is full of quotes all saying the same thing – that justice delayed is justice denied.
In the Commons Mark Wild, the HS2 chief executive, is giving evidence to the transport committee. He said the physical structures for the line should have been “largely completed” by now under the project’s initial timeline. But only 60% were ready, he said.
The construction of the civil engineering should have been largely completed by now. The reality is we’re about 60% complete.
As PA Media reports, Wild said the main causes of the delays and budget overruns were starting construction work without the finalised design or consents being in place, contracts which meant the government held all the risk in case of problems, and failings of HS2 Ltd.
Ministers ‘not dragging our heels’ over compensation for infected blood scandal victims, Thomas-Symonds says
Sir Brian Langstaff, chair of the infected blood inquiry, is today publishing a report on how the compensation payment process is working for victims. When he published his main report into the scandal last year, he reserved the right to come back and monitor progress on compensation and, at a hearing in May, he heard evidence about victims being been “re-traumatised” by delays to – and flaws in – the scheme.
In his interview on the Today progamme, Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Cabinet Office minister, insisted the government was not causing delays.
“We’re not dragging our heels,” he said, pointing out that more than 2,000 people have been invited to start their claims process by the Infected Blood Compensation Authority. He went on:
Over 600 have been paid, and we’ve paid out over £488m … My priority is to ensure that we’re not creating even further delay after decades of injustice.
He also said he was “open” to ideas about how the scheme might be improved.
Minister rejects claims UK not doing enough to deter small boat crossings ahead of Starmer-Macron talks
Good morning. Yesterday Emmanuel Macron, the French president, enjoyed the best ceremonial aspects of his state visit – being hosted at Windsor Castle, addressing MPs and peers in the Royal Gallery at parliament, a state banquet. But today he is getting down to proper talks with Keir Starmer and, although they are expected to agree some new measures relating to curbing the number of small boats crossing the Channel, there are signs that the final deal might not be as wide-ranging as the UK government might have liked.
In their story about Macron’s address to parliament, Kiran Stacey and Morgan Ofori report:
The British government has been hoping to use the trip to show that its “EU reset” had borne fruit, including on the traditionally difficult subject of migration.
British officials have been hoping to sign a new deal that would involve Britain accepting asylum seekers who have a genuine family connection with the UK in return for being able to send others back to France. However, they had warned in recent days that it might not be ready in time for this trip.
And this morning the Daily Telegraph has splashed on a story saying Macron wants Britain to do more to reduce the “pull factors” the encourage migrants to cross the channel. In their story, James Crisp and Charles Hymas say:
The Telegraph understands that Mr Macron wants Sir Keir to crack down on the UK’s black market for labour and welfare payments and make family reunification for genuine asylum seekers easier as conditions for the deal.
An Elysée source warned that Mr Macron expected measures “addressing the root causes of the factors that attract people to the United Kingdom”, adding: “These causes must also be addressed by the British.”
Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Cabinet Office minister responsible for post-Brexit relations with the EU, has been doing an interview round this morning. He sounded a bit more defensive than usual for a minister talking about small boats, and he was not talking up the chances of a ‘one in, one out’ deal. Here are the main points.
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Thomas-Symonds insisted that the UK is already addressing the “pull factors” affecting small boat crossings. Asked about Macron’s supposed views, as set out in the Telegraph splash, he told the Today programme:
Addressing pull factors is exactly what we have been doing. That is why there’s been over 7,000 arrests here in the United Kingdom dealing with things like, for example, illegal working which this government has been cracking down on.
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He claimed that policy was moving “in the right direction” on small boats. The number of crossings is at a record level for this time of year. But Thomas-Symonds told Today the numbers would have been even higher if it had not been for action taken by the British and the French. He said:
We have prevented, working together with the French authorities, and indeed beyond across Europe, 12,000 people from crossing the Channel who otherwise would have done.
We have seized 600 boats that otherwise would be being used in the channel.
When Emma Barnett, the presenter, said that having crossing numbers at a record level was nothing to boast about, Thomas-Symonds said he was not boasting. But he went on:
Preventing 12,000 people from crossing is most definitely something that is in the right direction …
To your point about numbers, we’ve seen, yes, over 21,000 have crossed so far this year. There was a 10-week period in 2022 when we had 20,000 people who crossed in that intense period.
But nobody, nobody, is boasting about those numbers.
There is no simple solution to that issue.
It is about it’s not about gimmicks, it’s not about performative politics, it is about doing the hard yards of solving this.
We obviously want to see, in the bilateral relationship with France, which is crucial, but also around Europe, more people smugglers being arrested. We want to see more people prevented from attempting that dangerous crossing, more prosecutions of people smugglers.
And you do that by deepening your intelligence sharing. That’s what we’re doing in Dunkirk, for example. I’ve been down to Dover, I’ve been across to France, I’ve literally seen this work happening, and it yields results. Just the last couple of weeks, we saw nine people in Lille sentenced nine people to 64 years in total for people smuggling offences. That’s work between our National Crime Agency and the French authorities.
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And he rejected claims that, by abandoning the Tories’ Rwanda policy, the government had removed the deterrent for people tempted to cross the channel. When it was put to him that there was no deterrent, he replied:
Sorry, but we do have a deterrent, and the deterrent has been the 30,000 people who’ve been removed by this government who have no right to be here.
Knowing and having that in place, that people who have no right to be here will be deported, is a far more effective deterrent than spending £700m pounds on a gimmick that sent four volunteers to Rwanda.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.15am: Mark Wild, HS2 chief executive, and Lord Hendy, rail minister, give evidence to the Commons transport committee about HS2.
10.40am: John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, is on a visit to Falkirk community hospital to announce a further £85m for initiatives that improve the flow of patients through the health service.
Noon: Keir Starmer faces Kemi Badenoch at PMQs.
12.30pm: Sir Brian Langstaff, chair of the infected blood inquiry, publishes a report on how the compensation payment process is working.
After 12.45pm: MPs resume their debate on the universal credit and personal independent payment bill. They will vote on amendments at 6pm, and the vote on third reading will take place at 7pm.
1.15pm: Emmanuel Macron, the French president, arrives in Downing Street for talks with Starmer.
1.30pm: Pat McFadden, Cabinet Office minister, and Douglas Alexander, trade minister, give evidence to the Commons business sub-committee on economic security, arms and export controls.
2.30pm: Jo Stevens, Welsh secretary, gives evidence to the Commons Welsh affairs committee.
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